NEW YORK—Iowa is a magical place. On caucus night four years ago, I was in a banquet hall at the edge of Des Moines, setting up filing desks for reporters sent to cover Howard Dean’s victory party. I had been on the campaign for three months, a peon in an enormous operation that had seemed, until just a few days earlier, utterly unstoppable. When the results came in, I wasn’t so much disappointed as confused: we came third? So I couldn’t help feeling a bit of sympathy for Hillary Clinton on Thursday night.
Or at least, for Clinton’s staffers. Campaign workers are the ones who take defeat the hardest — you wouldn’t be able to work the gruelling hours of a presidential campaign if you didn’t believe in your candidate, and nothing hurts like finding out the party feels otherwise. But there’s another reason to feel sorry for Clinton’s campaign workers. Right now, Clinton staffers (and John Edwards’, if he still has any) are the only people in the Democratic universe who aren’t allowed to be excited about Barack Obama.
What’s so exciting? It’s hard to spot the difference between Clinton and Obama on policy, a point even his supporters don’t bother disputing. Is part of Obama’s appeal his identity — the sum of his biological and biographical parts? “Consider this hypothetical,” writes Andrew Sullivan in the December issue of the Atlantic:
“It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”
It’s hard to resist Sullivan’s argument: Obama’s identity as a black man leading the Democratic pack, his physical embodiment of hope, is enough for anyone to get excited about. But there’s more than that. Watch Obama’s speech from Thursday night, and you feel you’re watching a scene plucked from Aaron Sorkin’s imagination: this is what politicians ought to sound like, which until now has mostly just happened in television.
Obama’s the frontrunner after Iowa, a mantle that brings little comfort: Clintons are fighters, as everybody keeps saying, and who knows what knives are being sharpened this weekend. But I hope her staffers don’t beat themselves up if they start having second thoughts. Barack Obama, by his very candidacy, is telling people they have the power to change America. After Iowa, it looks like they might succeed. How long can anyone resist getting excited?
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